Until the Dawn’s Light

by Aharon Appelfeld, translated from the Hebrew by Jeffrey M. Green (Schocken; $26)

In this novel, set in turn-of-the-century Austria, a young woman named Blanca converts from Judaism to marry her Christian high-school crush, Adolf. The marriage quickly turns hellish, and Blanca flees to the countryside with her four-year-old son—haunted by the gnomic admonitions of her cruel grandmother, who disapproved of her conversion, and by memories of a youth whose promise she threw away. Her family prized logic, and her marriage is its great subversion: the lapse sends her inexorably into delusive irrationality, and the narrative fits the decline, becoming increasingly surreal. As in much of Appelfeld’s work, the Holocaust echoes in complex ways: not just in Adolf’s symbolic oppression of Blanca—and his matter-of-fact declaration that “we’ll eliminate” the Jews—but in the way that the promise of assimilation becomes a perversion, permanently damaging Blanca, who by the end has resigned herself to living “an amputated life.” ♦

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